"Climate change undermines improvements in global health, as well as in local and international food security: areas the Gates Foundation has championed.
He said: "The great industrial fortune of the 20th century, the Rockefeller oil legacy, has begun aggressively divesting from fossil fuel, arguing explicitly that climate change undermines its philanthropy for a better world.
The London Mining Network, an alliance of human rights, development and environmental groups, said the fact that the bridge – promoted as creating a river crossing habitat for wildlife – was linked with the world's biggest supplier of seaborne thermal coal, and therefore significant a contributor to climate change, undermined its environmental credibility.
With the UN estimating an extra 2-3 billion mouths to feed by 2050 and climate change undermining crop production by 2percentt per decade, the prospects of preventing the crisis in time look bleak.
A new commentary by Edward Maibach, Teresa Myers and Anthony Leiserowitz in Earth's Future notes that most people don't know there is a scientific consensus about human-caused climate change, which undermines public engagement on the subject.
So as the debate over carbon pricing has burned continually hot, there have been concerted attempts to undermine the science linking human activity to climate change and undermine the impacts.
Some are concerned that a strong agreement on climate change will undermine the efforts of developing nations to build their economies, but the opposite is true.
The World Bank will invest heavily in clean energy and only fund coal projects in "circumstances of extreme need" because climate change will undermine efforts to eliminate extreme poverty, says its president Jim Yong Kim.
Caroline Flint, Labour's shadow energy secretary, said: "There is a real risk the government's dash for gas will blow a hole through our climate change targets, undermine investment in clean energy and leave households vulnerable to price shocks and rising energy bills".
It is an unprecedented and frightening situation in a country that has a reputation as one of Africa's best-run economies — a rare place that has successfully translated its diamond wealth into genuine development — and one which illustrates how climate change is undermining progress and creating new challenges for societies in the developing world.
As individuals, there is a limit to what we can do in our own lives, but we can and should call for government action and ask our leaders to stand up to those who would deny climate change or undermine efforts to move forward with clean energy.
